Hey guys,
I know Haiku is still under development, but is there a way I can setup my pc for a dual boot of XP and Haiku? I’m new to both Haiku and BeOS, and after I discovered that I can’t run R5 on my computer (XP and over 1 gig of RAM), I thought I’d check out what Be has evolved into. I have an open partition, and if somebody could tell me how to format it to BFS/OpenBFS and build Haiku, I’d be happy to pound away at it for beta testing and development :). Thanks in advance.
At the moment, the only way I know of is to install from within a BeOS environment. Unless you want to buy a copy of Zeta (because of the hardware support), I’m pretty sure you won’t be able to install Haiku.
If BeOS MAX still doesn’t work with >1 gig RAM, would this boot floppy help? In that case it should be possible to install.
Hmm, I just tried the image and I still got a boot failure for trying to load BeOS PE 5. It said:
“PANIC: the bootloader was unable to find a beos volume to boot from. If you are trying to boot from a CD-ROM…”
Any ideas?
Is it because I’m trying to use PE? I think I tried BeOS Max 3.1b1 before and had a similar error. Does anyone know where I can download BeOS Max v3? The sourceforge (via BeBits) is no longer hosting the files. I’ll see if I can get that to work.
AFAICT it’s an issue of the kernel’s compatibility with something to do with the chipset. My wife’s machine (SiS something-or-other chipset) won’t boot R5 or Zeta and it chokes on that very error. It’s the only one I’ve tried in all my years of BeOS usage that has had that problem. Dare I say it, you’re out of luck on this one AFAIK. 
Oh no really?!?! What kind of computer does your wife have? I was trying to install this on a Dell Inspiron 5100 notebook, P4 2.4 Ghz, 1Gig ram, Intel 8280 1DB controller/bridge for chipset, currently running Win XP.
There isn’t any fix at all for this?
It’s a frankenstein box, but the only problem in the entire setup is the motherboard, which is a SiS 741gx chipset. The rest is stuff I used on R5 boxes before. I’m not very familiar with Inspirons, but if you’ve gotten the error using PE, the only other option to try is Zeta. As I said before, neither worked on my wife’s machine, but it’s possible Zeta might work on yours, especially considering you’ve got 1GB of RAM installed. R5 would piddle out on you because of the amount of RAM you’ve got unless you installed the RAM-limiting patch. When it comes to patches, you might be able to nag YellowTab into supporting it, but I’m not so sure that’d be the best route to go.
Some good news: I found two things that I’m going to try to solve the dual boot problem with. The first, as I’m sure you all know, is that Zeta Live CD 1.1 just came out. Outside of the fact that a lot of it is in German, I got it to boot on my main desktop, so I’m sure it will work on my laptop. I’m thinking maybe I could setup the boot somehow with that.
Option two is that I just found the BeOS R5 Developer’s Edition online, and that seems like it could work too. It’s really fast - I installed it on an old PC (PII 333 Mhz, 64MB of RAM) just for testing purposes, and it takes less than 20 seconds to boot up.
Since Option 2 is the easiest, I’m going to try that first. So some questions I have are:
Can I get Haiku to run off of this?
How much space should I allocate? I was thinking of only a few gig at most.
When I install BeOS Developer, at the end it asks me if I want to install the Be bootmanager. Since the PC already has windows on it, would installing this prevent me from booting windows? What should I use so that I can choose which one to boot?
Related to 3. Since I have >1gig of ram, do I not even need a boot manager, and would I just use the RAM limiting boot disk that bogo posted?
Thanks a lot everybody!!
With the success that people have had running Haiku images in VMware’s free runtime environment, maybe someone should investigate making a BeOS Max\Dev edition VMware image. That way folks can try it out within the (so-called) comfort and safety of their current OS.
I’d do it myself if I had any idea how. Perhaps whoever creates the Haiku VMware images knows a quick and easy way to do it.